ENERGY GUEST BLOG -- HEIDI GOROVITZ ROBERTSON

Ohio, U.S. are not alone in seeing public divided over shale development

Heidi Gorovitz Robertson is a professor of law and associate dean for academic enrichment at the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law at Cleveland State University.

Public opinion battles, especially surrounding the hydraulic fracturing techniques used in production, have been heating up around the globe as well as around the United States and Ohio.

The United Kingdom's Guardian newspaper recently commissioned a poll that concluded public opinion in the United Kingdom was split evenly regarding whether oil and gas producers should be allowed to use hydraulic fracturing technologies. For every 10 people the pollsters questioned, four favored allowing the procedure, four opposed it and two were undecided.

Germany is divided, too. By a published draft law last February, Germany moved to allow shale oil and gas development using hydraulic fracturing technologies in certain circumstances.

The proposed measure met with substantial resistance. In particular, Germany's Green party and the Social Democrats have sought a complete halt in the march towards hydraulic fracturing, and the issue has become particularly divisive in the run-up to the German elections scheduled for later this month.

Some say Germany sits atop 2,300 billion cubic meters of shale gas and that Germany currently consumes about 86 billion cubic meters of gas, much of which it imports from Russia. That's huge, and if Germany can produce it efficiently, it could be, as they say, a game changer.

Whereas the U.K. and Germany seem tortured by the politics of shale oil and gas, France and Bulgaria now seem united and fervent in their opposition to it. France has a shale drilling moratorium, put in place when it was clear public opinion was strongly against shale oil and gas development. Following public protests, Bulgaria canceled the exploration permit it previously had granted to Chevron.

It's controversial in South Africa, too, where there are big industry pushes (by Royal Dutch Shell, specifically) to move forward with the practice, as well as predictably heated opposition to it (because, among other reasons, water is scarce and hydraulic fracturing demands a lot of it).

The Republic of South Africa's government has put forth a plan to allow drilling for shale gas in that country's Karoo region, and, in response to public concern, the Department of Water and Environmental Affairs has stated its intent to require fracturing activities to obtain a water use license. Time will tell how easy or difficult it is to obtain the water use license; there is substantial support for shale production in the upper levels of South African government.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration has found that South Africa has the fifth-largest reserves of shale gas in the world with approximately 485 trillion cubic feet. If so, many South Africans believe it could fundamentally change South Africa's energy situation, and likely it could.

Even in the recent past, South Africa had limited shale oil and gas exploration to traditional technologies, like geological field mapping, data gathering, seismic reflection, and limited drilling, without hydraulic fracturing, to establish the sizes and shapes of shale reserves. But in the past month, the government announced that it has been advised to allow drilling, with hydraulic fracturing, for the benefit of the South African economy. Public opposition abounds.

Poland has moved forward with shale production and hydraulic fracturing technologies despite some public outcry. It has issued more than 100 licenses for shale oil and gas explorations, from which at least 48 exploratory wells have been drilled. Although none is yet producing in Poland, the U.S. Energy Information Administration believes the Baltic Basin, which runs from northern Poland into Lithuania, is a great shale oil and gas prospect.

Lithuania, which hoped to reduce its energy dependence on Russia by developing its own shale oil and gas resources, has gone forward after some public outcry with issuing shale development authorization to U.S. Chevron.

There have been protests and marches all over the world, from New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio in the United States, to Sussex, England and the Karoo, South Africa, and in many other places. Perhaps, as people fear and believe, the technologies are not safe enough. But perhaps they are just not understood well enough to be safe.

Notably, in many of the countries where public outcry is high, there is little potential upside for residents because they don't own the mineral rights. They aren't seeing a personal financial benefit and they're only suffering from the inconveniences of exploration and production, and the environmental and other negative consequences.

Still, the research, education, and/or public relations operations have failed miserably, as evidenced by the public outcry and divisions in public opinion in Ohio, the United States and the world.

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